The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster: book review

The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster (2006) is an interconnected compilation of three of the author’s detective novels: City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986), and The Locked Room(1986). They are all set in New York.

In City of Glass, Daniel Quinn is a mystery writer who writes under the pseudonym William Wilson. In the middle of the night a man telephones him, a wrong number, seeking a private detective. Quinn becomes embroiled in a real crime. Peter Stillman thinks he is going to be murdered and wants protection. What he says may or may not be true. Then he goes missing. Quinn sees a man identical to Peter only to learn that there is Peter Stillman senior and Peter Stillman junior.

In Ghosts, set in mid-summer 1948, Mr White hires private detective Blue, a mentee of Brown, to spy on Black from a window on Orange Street. But who is Mr Gold? Blue becomes a writer reporting to White.

In The Locked Room, Sophie Fanshawe and her son Ben are left on their own when Sophie’s husband disappears. All they have are his novels. Mr Fanshawe’s friend, an uncreative writer, publishes Fanshawe’s novels as his own and becomes part of the family.

Some of the connections between the three novels are the city, the narrative-style, detectives as the main source of truth-finding, writers penning various forms of expression, inter-textuality, coincidence, and lost or missing characters. The protagonist in each novel walks the streets of New York ‘unseen’ as if in a slipstream, witness to the events that unfold. Stories within stories, the writers are also readers.

Complex, complicated, connective threads reveal truths, lies, secrets, subterfuge, pseudonyms, twinships, double plots, and triple threats. All are fascinating novels in their own right, and when combined they become a triple delight.

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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